Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (14 page)
• When most people think of Las Vegas, they usually think of “The Strip,” the stretch of glitzy hotels and casinos that was first built in the 1950s. But technically, most of the Strip isn’t in Las Vegas—it’s located in Paradise, Nevada.
• Las Vegas’s biggest wedding chapel is called (what else?) Viva Las Vegas. It seats 100 guests.
• Gangster Bugsy Siegel opened the first hotel in Vegas—the Flamingo—in 1946.
• Over 40,000 people moved to Las Vegas in 2005, bumping up the population to 545,000.
• There were 27 named tropical storms during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active one since record keeping began 150 years ago.
• Sorry, Zorba. Hurricanes are given names starting with letters A through W (no Q, U, X, Y, or Z).
• A hurricane weighs about the same as 40
million
elephants—more than all the elephants on Earth. Maybe even more than all the elephants
ever
on Earth.
• There are an estimated 16 million thunderstorms globally each year.
• Kampala, Uganda, may hold the world record for thunderstorms: It averages 242 thundery days each year. (Central Florida is pretty stormy too: It has approximately 100 thunderstorm days annually.)
• Thunder is caused by lightning: Air surrounding the lightning heats rapidly, then expands and contracts at supersonic speeds, creating a series of claps and rumbles.
• The coastal deserts of Chile and Antarctica have almost no thunderstorms.
• When is a tropical storm not a tropical storm? When it has wind speeds of more than 74 miles per hour. Then it’s a hurricane.
They’re big, they’re lovable, and you’d better stay out of their way when they’re in a hurry!
• An elephant eats 250 pounds of plants and drinks 50 gallons of water a day.
• An elephant’s heart weighs about 48 pounds, a little more than the average six-year-old person’s entire body. An entire elephant weighs about the same as 70 grown men.
• The noise that elephants make while digesting food can be heard up to 200 yards away. But they can actually stop the sounds of digestion when they sense danger.
• Is your living room bigger than an elephant? Male elephants are usually about 20 feet long. But don’t try to bring one inside: They weigh about 16,500 pounds.
• Elephants have only four teeth for chewing. As their teeth wear down, they’re replaced up to six times. Old elephants who’ve used up all their teeth sometimes starve to death because they can’t chew anymore.
• Those ivory tusks are used for defense, digging for water, and lifting things.
• Elephants communicate over vast distances, warning other elephants of danger, telling them where to find water, and signaling that the mating season has begun.
• As long as they’re plugged in, appliances like microwave ovens and TV sets use energy even when they’re not turned on.
• Turn your computer off when you’re not using it; The energy required to keep it in standby mode costs $65 a year.
• Every 60 seconds of every day, the United States spends almost $ 1 million on energy.
• Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to run your TV for three hours. Recycling one glass bottle could provide enough energy to light a 100-watt lightbulb for four hours.
• Only 4% of the energy put out by an incandescent lightbulb is light—the rest is wasted producing heat.
• Over its lifetime, the average microwave oven uses more energy running its digital clock than it does heating food.
• Talk about efficient: The Hubble Space Telescope completes one orbit around the Earth in just 97 minutes. To do it, the Hubble uses about the same amount of energy as it takes to light 30 lightbulbs.
• A nation’s
official language
is a language that’s been given “privileged” status and is used for legal and public documents. Many countries have more than one, especially if several cultural groups live there.
• The country with the most official languages is India, with 23: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Urdu, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Oriya, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri, Santhalii, Tamil, Sindh, Te lugu, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. (South Africa is second, with 11.)
• Irish, the
official first
language of the Republic of Ireland, is spoken by less than a third of the population. English, its
official second
language, is spoken by nearly everyone.
• Can a country have
no
official language? Yes—half of the world’s nations don’t have one, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.
• Israel’s official languages are Hebrew and Arabic.
•
Sprechen-vous Italiano
? Switzerland has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansch.
• New Zealand’s third official language, after English and Maori, is New Zealand Sign Language. It’s the first official sign language in the world.
• Sandy Allen, an American, is the world’s tallest living woman. She’s 7 feet, 7 ¼ inches tall and wears size 22 shoes.
• The shortest man in the world, Younis Edwan of Jordan, is 25 ½ inches tall.
• Bulgaria’s Kolyo Tanev Kolev has had a bullet lodged in his skull for more than 60 years.
• In his lifetime, Maurice Creswick of South Africa has donated over 350 pints of blood.
• China’s Xie Qiuping has been letting her hair grow since 1973; it’s now more than 18 feet long.
• The U.K.’s Garry Turner can stretch his skin a distance of 6 ½ inches.
• Lucky Diamond Rich of Australia had his entire body tattooed with black ink, including his eyelids, the skin between his toes, and his gums.
• Lee Redmond of the United States hasn’t cut her fingernails since 1979. Combined, they measure over 24 feet long.
• Weighing in at more than 1,400 pounds, Jon Brower Minnoch of Washington was officially the heaviest person in medical history.
• The first Sony product was a rice cooker.
• U-Haul spends more money on advertising in the Yellow Pages than any other company.
• Two-thirds of home-based businesses are owned by women.
• The five most valuable brand names as of 2005: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Intel. The fastest up-and-coming brands are Apple, Blackberry, Google,
Amazon.com
, and Yahoo!
• Nine out of 10 restaurants fail in their first year. Of the ones that stay open, 9 out of 10 fail in their second year.
• Tuesday is the most productive day of the workweek in Canada.
• Businessmen are called “salarymen” in Japan.
• The average business document is copied 19 times. (And about one in every 10 of them gets lost.)
• Tiffany & Co. made $4.98 in sales on their opening day in 1837.
• The world’s most popular perfume: Chanel No. 5. One bottle is sold every 30 seconds.
• How tiny can you get? A “micron” is equal to 1/1000th of a millimeter.
• There’s a liquid measure called a “hogshead,” probably because it’s about the same size as a real hog’s head. It holds 432 pints.
• A “dash” is 1/16 of a teaspoon.
• Horses are measured in “hands.” This particular kind of hand is equivalent to four inches.
• There are 86,400 seconds in a day.
• A “gross” is one dozen dozens. That’s 12 times 12, which equals 144.
• In England, a person’s weight is measured in “stones.” A stone is equal to 14 pounds, or 6.35 kg.
• A “score” is a unit of measure that means 20. Four score years, for example, is 4 x 20, or 80 years.
• Racetracks are measured in “furlongs.” There are eight furlongs in a mile.
• One million hours add up to 114 years.
• Here’s an easy way to remember that there are four quarts in a gallon: A quart is a
quarter
of a gallon.
• It takes about 120 drops of water to fill a teaspoon.
• The Amazon rain forest in South America was named after a mythical tribe of female warriors who supposedly lived there.
• Good name for a running shoe: Nike was the Greek goddess of victory.
• Spiders are called
arachnids
after Arachne, a girl in Greek mythology who wove a tapestry that made fun of the gods and goddesses—not a good idea—so the goddess Athena turned her into a spider.
• The word “cereal” comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain.
• Some Native American peoples believed in “tricksters,” spirits who took animal forms, such as a fox or coyote, and caused mischief and humiliation.
• In Greek myth, Pandora’s box—which contained all the world’s evils, and which Pandora was warned not to open, but she did, anyway—wasn’t a box. It was a jar.
• The (former) planet Pluto was named after the Roman god of the underworld because it’s so far away from the Sun that it seems to be in eternal darkness.
• Wednesday is named for the Norse god Odin. Thursday is named for Thor, the god of thunder.
• The four winds, or
Anemoi
, from Greek mythology had names: They are Boreas (north wind), Notus (south wind), Eurus (east wind), and Zephyrus (west wind).
• The word “pencil” is Latin for “little tail.”
• We still call it “lead,” but the core of a modern pencil is actually a combination of graphite and clay.
• The amount of carbon in the human body could fill about 9,000 pencils.
• In 1851 there were 319 companies in Great Britain that manufactured pencils.
• Americans buy 2.5 billion pencils a year
• How many times can a pencil be sharpened? About 17 times.
• 75 percent of all pencils sold in the United States are yellow. Why? Tradition. In the 1800s, the best pencils came from China, where yellow was associated with royalty.
• Three things one ordinary pencil can do: 1) make about 4,000 check marks before needing to be sharpened again, 2) write 45,000 words, and 3) draw a line 35 miles long.
• Pencils are international: They’re made of wood from Pacific cedars, graphite from Madagascar, and carnauba wax from Brazil.
• Carpenters use square pencils so they won’t roll off roofs.
• The largest pencil ever made is 65 feet high. (It’s on the grounds of a pencil factory in Malaysia.)
